Featured Short

Chase Me Through

Two lovers blur the lines between life and art, re-imagining their love story despite tragedy, regret and everlasting saudade.

Often it feels like we’ve heard the same love story premise hundreds of times before, but that might be because the storytellers are not being creative enough. Blake Salzman gives us ‘Chase Me Through’, a film about a couple navigating the beginning and end of their relationship, but manages to take the quintessential romantic drama to new emotional heights. By highlighting the subliminal, fragile details of their lives in glimpses, dreams and memory alike, the film presents a fresh, imaginary viewing experience.

…inspired by In The Mood for Love, Last Year at Marienbad, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I wanted to use this classic premise as an exploration of memories, feelings, and dreams. The word saudade – a portuguese word for an spiritual sense of loss, a yearning and desire for a love that may never have existed – came up a lot as I conceptualized the piece. Indebted to some of the great art cinema of the 60s and 70s, I wanted to tell a story that reflected that sentiment, a romantic film cogent in feeling yet experimental in narrative and format.

‘Chase Me Through’ is a timeless film that flashes forward and back with an uncanny dreamlike quality that’s both surreal and intimate. It’s about finding peace and acceptance with the past, when your finest and darkest memories come flashing through all at once.

The film presents itself as a balance between illusion and reality, our lovers projecting their ideal ‘story’ onto the bitter, tragic memories from their past. Spanning decades in time, I aimed to present a reality in flux, where our lovers blur the lines between life and art, torn between their greatest dreams together and the truth, forever trapped in limbo as they choose to recapitulate their story over and over. Running away together as children, creating a home and married in the most idyllic setting… The classic love story told on their terms, with only their failure to make a family holding them back.

All summed up, Blake exceeds all our expectations from what we can expect from a short story, combined with a beautiful and passionate performance by Jules Willcox and Gabriel Gooley (along with their respective younger selves Baily Michelle Brown and Teo Briones). And we must also mention the tensely orchestrated soundtrack created by Kyle Parker, which fantastically takes us to an even deeper imaginative reel. ‘Chase Me Through’ is fuel for the creative mind, and certainly something you will watch over and over again, yielding greater rewards each time.